


Radio Free

by Falling Rain (fallingrain)



Category: Heaven Will Be Mine (Visual Novel), We Know the Devil (Visual Novel)
Genre: Canon-Typical Woo-Woo Physics, Gen, POV First Person, Post Cradle's Graces Ending, Post-Canon, Present Tense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:00:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24721975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallingrain/pseuds/Falling%20Rain
Summary: A vignette about the other side of Pluto's equation.
Kudos: 11





	Radio Free

I climb down from the attic, wiping the sweat off my forehead.

The work is slow going. I have to do most of it by hand, and even getting the raw materials without people noticing is starting to get complicated. In short, it’s hard to build a radio dish this big in secret. Especially in “wartime”. More especially in a war of ideals, where unsanctioned transmissions are likely to be enemy action.

And most especially, if that’s exactly what the antenna in question is for.

I sigh, and look out the window at the overcast sky, the stars invisible. Born too late to go to space myself, born too early to know the outcome of this acrimonious divorce.

There’s a part of me that wants so, so badly to be up there. A body that’s myself exactly. Ideals turned actual.

But who’d take me there? Memorial Foundation, who wants Heaven emptied under the naive assumption that Earth Culture will be willing to learn space's lessons? Gaia Firma, who wants Heaven _destroyed_?

Heh, or maybe I could sign up as a Troop Leader and go with the Scouts. I’ve certainly still got enough church contacts… but that would be the worst betrayal of all, wouldn’t it? To reach heaven by kowtowing to a... predator-meme in a God costume.

So here I am, stuck on Earth, while my comrades far away in space try to carve out a Cultural reference frame where people like us can live.

From here, it seems almost impossible, doesn’t it?

But it stands to reason that it would feel that way. Gravitation is local. It exerts force most strongly in those spaces and times and Cultural contexts where the ones applying the force are near.

Hence the antenna. Radio may still obey the inverse square law, but - properly powered and attenuated - it’s also singularly good at establishing point-to-point communication over long distances. It’s been used that way since it was invented - as a way to get Culture across spaciotemporal blockades, into totalitarian regimes that try and fail to jam the signal.

Isn’t that why Scouts use radios? To project their god into a place and a moment that has shut it out?

So that’s what I’d been working on, the better part of this last year. A satellite dish the size of my attic, and a repeater antenna in the garage. A direct point-to-point link with a different Heaven than that of 109.8, a different kind of Grace. A beachhead by which the people up there fighting can project their own Culture, their own tidal authority, into Earth’s reference frame.

If I can’t go to Heaven, then I can at least try my best to help bring it here to Earth.


End file.
